Systems Management Server sites interact with Microsoft SQL Server in order to support all the major Systems Management Server features. As the use of Systems Management Server is expanded, the Systems Management Server site server requires increasing amounts of system resources. If the Systems Management Server SQL database is placed on another system running Windows NT Server and Microsoft SQL Server, it allows the site server to have more of the available system resources. The added overhead of maintaining a network session with a remote SQL Server is substantially lower than running SQL Server on a site server machine, provided the amount of data being transferred is not great and SQL Server is not located across many network links.
If you decide to initially run Systems Management Server and Microsoft SQL Server on the same Microsoft BackOffice platform, you may later change the Systems Management Server server to use a different SQL Server system. This may be accomplished via the use of SQL Server database administration utilities to move the Systems Management Server database and by changing the location of the SQL Server with the Systems Management Server setup application.
The determination of when you should move to a remote SQL Server system can only be made through the monitoring of system resources and performance via Windows NT Performance Monitor and/or other monitoring mechanisms.